AEREOBALLET BLOG

Bold Bodies is born. All about dance.

Please Join US!!!

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”—Merce Cunningham

For more than 50 years, Merce Cunningham has been a driving force in modern dance. Working with the idea that dance and music should be able to exist independently of each other while sharing the same time and space (a concept developed with longtime musical collaborator and life partner John Cage), and making use of chance in developing choreographic phrases, Cunningham has challenged the way we create and view dance. He is also an avid student of new technology, and has embraced film, video and computer animation. As a result, a wealth of his work is available on video, as are tapes of his class exercises. Cunningham has created nearly 200 dances for his own company; his works have also been performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, Boston Ballet, White Oak Dance Project and others. 

A strong sense of one’s spine is an integral part of Cunningham technique, which explores the way that the back works either in opposition to the legs or in unison with them. Space is also an important factor, as is a sense of direction. In his choreography and class exercises, Cunningham developed a way of referencing “front” so that dancers don’t think about movement in terms of moving toward a point in space (most often, facing the audience), but rather in terms of where each individual body is facing.

Lester Horton, one of the best ever!

Horton developed his own approach to dance that incorporated diverse elements including Native American Folk Dance, Japanese arm gestures, Javanese and Balinese isolations for the upper body, particularly the eyes, head and hands. Horton also included Afro-Caribbean elements, like hip circles. Horton's dance technique, which is now commonly known as Horton Technique, has no style, per se. The technique emphasizes a whole body, anatomical approach to dance that includes flexibility, strength, coordination and body and spatial awareness to enable unrestricted, dramatic freedom of expression.

The Horton technique is a codified syllabus that is separated into movement categories comprised of detailed exercises called Studies, which include Projections, Locomotions, Preludes, Rhythms, Improvisations, and Fortifications. The fortifications are considered the core of Horton technique. They establish a framework of movement mechanics, of muscular development and coordination, elasticity and range, rhythm and timing of phrasing, and movement quality.

Types of stretching:

Static Stretching: A slow, passive stretch held for 15-30 seconds or longer. This is best done AFTER class, when your muscles are warm and elastic.

Ballistic Stretching: Using uncontrolled bouncing or bobbing movements to get a stretch. Because of high injury risk, it is recommended that only athletes who undergo a sport or exercise that has ballistic or plyometric movements use this type of stretching.

Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation Stretching (PNF): In this type of stretching the muscle is engaged in an isometric contraction for about 6 seconds, then it is let go and relaxed into a slow, passive stretch to the point of limitation.

The Vaganova method is a ballet technique and training system devised by the Russian dancer and pedagogue Agrippina Vaganova (1879–1951). It fuses elements of traditional French style from the romantic era with the athleticism and virtuosity of Italian technique. The training system is designed to involve the whole body in every movement, with equal attention paid to the upper body, legs and feet. Vaganova believed that this approach increases consciousness of the body, thus creating a harmony of movement and greater expressive range.

Great example of a simple, emotional and ironic coreo. All my love and admiration to them.

www.josephsimonsdance.com